AP Photo/Jeff Roberson Dr. Rob Garofalo, left, a physician specializing in adolescent medicine at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, listens in on a conversation at the Broadway Youth Center in Chicago. Garofalo helped create the youth center, which is one of the few places across the country services and support to transgender youth. F rom the time she could talk, Maggie* has told her parents that she is a boy. She doesn’t say, “I want to be a boy.” She doesn’t say, “I feel like a boy.” She says, “I am a boy.” She tells her classmates, too. Lately—she’s in elementary school now—they’ve been having debates about it. “Maggie’s a boy,” one kid said recently, in a not-unfriendly, matter-of-fact sort of way. “No, you idiot,” countered another. “She’s a girl. She’s wearing pink shoes.” On a recent Tuesday morning, psychologist Kenneth Zucker tells this story...

Last week, birth control for college students got cheaper. An "affordable birth control" provision in the 2009 appropriations bill, which President Barack Obama signed last Wednesday, restored an incentive for drug makers to offer college health clinics discounts on the pill (the longstanding incentive had been inadvertently eliminated in a 2005 deficit-reduction bill). Still, even when it's cheaper, birth control will continue to be two things: inconvenient and thoroughly tied up with the medical system. A trip to the doctor. Time off from work. A waiting room. A pap smear. A co-pay (assuming you're insured, of course). A trip to the pharmacy. Another co-pay. Then, finally, your birth control: 28 little pills, packaged in foil and plastic, standing between you and a pregnancy you don't want. If you are one of the 11.6 million women in this country who relies on the pill to prevent pregnancy, this scenario, or some variation on it, has played out in your life again and again. It may...

Elizabeth Gaynes has worked with people involved in the criminal justice system for more than 30 years: as a young law student in the early 1970s, she was galvanized by the uprising at Attica, and helped to defend some of the incarcerated people who were involved. Later, she took the reins as executive director of the nonprofit Osborne Association, which provides services to incarcerated people and their communities. But until her daughter turned 16 and started speaking up about prison issues, Gaynes kept a rather relevant piece of personal information close to her chest: her kids' own father was incarcerated, and had been for a decade. "We really didn't volunteer that information very much in the world," she says. "Even people like me who worked in this business felt pretty restrained." All of that's changed now. Part of it, Gaynes says, was her daughter's outspokenness. Part of it, however, was a larger cultural shift that is now reaching a tipping point. People affected by...

When Margaret Sanger was arrested in 1916 for "obscenity" (which is to say, advocating birth control), diaphragms were a revolutionary way for women to take control of their bodies. What do most women think of diaphragms today? Yawn. So quaint, so old-fashioned, so ... Margaret Sanger. The number of women using the diaphragm has fallen steeply since highly effective hormonal methods were introduced in the United States in the 1960s. What was once the country's most common contraceptive device is now used by less than 2 percent of couples nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A small but growing number of researchers and advocates think that the oldest contraceptive on the market -- a latex or silicone cup with a firm, flexible rim and a shallow dome -- could be re-imagined for the 21st century. A Seattle-based international nonprofit organization, Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), is working on a diaphragm redesign, the first ever...